Sallygarden Smallholding - The Forum For Sustainable Living

Hi, I was at a show yesterday and saw a wormery that has a stack of trays. They send you the worms etc, and the great thing is you can add a lot more than the usual compost stuff, eg bread/pasta, and there is a tap to drain off useful water for your plants. When they have eaten from one tray the worms move up to the next tray. It is being sold by finnis organic worms, and the wormery is alled 'The worm works' Made in America apparently. Has anyone any experience of these? What do you think of wormeries in general? Thanks.

Hi

I think wormeries are good for a few reasons and they especially useful if you live in an urban environment without space for a compost bin. The wormery, as far as I know, can be kept indoors. The worms also speed up the composting process.

Reasons not to have a wormery? I think they need to be kept in certain optimal conditions to ensure they don't all die .... not too dry, not too wet and fed regularly with kitchen waste. We have quite a bit of land, so the bigger the compost the better the more efficient the composting process is. Wild worms will naturally rise up into the compost anyway and do their thing.

We've never added worms to our composts but they are full of them, especially if you can add a bit of manure. Making a compost bin out of old wooden pallets is ideal and make roughly a meter cubed space.

Let us know what you decide to do and how you get on. Does anybody else have experience of wormeries? You can also buy tiger worms from fishing tackle shops.

I had a worm bin about 11 years ago when they were "all the rage". Yes it worked for a bit; and yes all the worms died - exactly as Rebecca says, they need optimal conditions and ours became too wet. One evening they were fine and doing great work; the next morning they were all dead and the bin was clearly very wet.

I agree with Rebecca. If you have a compost bin or system in the garden you will naturally get worms to work it for you. If you want to boost it with bought worms fine. If your garden doesn't have many worms add some good farmyard manure (most farmers are happy for you to have some even if you have to collect it yourself - take a nose peg!) and you will soon have plenty.

We have a Can-o-Worms (the 3 layered wormery). We have had it for almost 7 years with the same original set of worms. My husband is in charge of the worms. He "feeds" them once a fortnight with the contents of our counter-top green bin. The rest of the time he ignores them. In the same period my mother has killed 3 lots of worms. My husband thinks that it is due to the fact that his have always been sheltered where my mothers are exposed.

We also have a garden composter that we put garden waste & left over kitchen waste into.